A roleplaying game about being at the bottom of the food chain

Tag Archives: game design

The other night we sitting around discussing what we needed to complete in order to get the game into the hands of play testers. As we discussed finalising the combat chapter and the “Doin’ Stuff” chapter we realised that there may be something that is more important than those. We asked ourselves “how would you convey to other groups how to play the game?”. Goblins! is not your average run of the mill roleplaying game. It is more heavily focused on roleplaying rather than action. There is no real incentive to roll a strong character. The life span of the Goblin is likely to be very short. The story is not likely to follow any recognisable preconceived plot of any kind.

To be fair, we hope we have designed a system which can support many different styles of play, and the method that we prefer is only one of them. Having said that, there are certain characteristics that we hope will become central to the game and consistent across all gaming groups. In attempting to answer this question I have addressed a few issues that tend to annoy and irritate some gamers (mostly GMs).

Well, we thought we were doing well and were right on track. Turns out we had no idea what we were talking about. What we discovered means a total rewrite of the combat system from scratch, removing a lot of the more cliché rule systems we were using and replacing it with a much more simple, yet extremely descriptive, combat system.

The old system we were using was dice based (d12 to be precise) and was, if we are honest, pretty iterative in its workings. During several playtesting sessions we started to realise two things: Continue reading →